[youtube]1ain4qftoM[/youtube]
If the video doesn’t show up here, you can view it on the actual YouTube site here.
Speaking of great American operas, Tobias Picker has written two of them; Emmeline, which is an unqualified masterpiece, and An American Tragedy, which I think history will regard more dearly than its contemporary reviews might suggest. Between those two landmarks, Picker wrote a kind of “forgotten” opera called Thérèse Raquin, an epic based on the Zola novel which, like Tragedy, involves an unwanted lover being chucked overboard in favor of a more attractive alternative. Picker’s psychiatrist, if he has one, could probably make something of that.
Thérèse Raquin premiered at The Dallas Opera in 2001 and is now having its New York premiere run, in a revised chamber version prepared by Picker, from Dicapo Opera Theatre.
The opera has three more performances this coming weekend: Friday and Saturday, February 23 and 24, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, February 25, at 4 p.m. Dicapo Opera Theatre is located at 184 East 76th Street in Manhattan, just off Lexington Avenue and directly underneath St. Jean-Baptiste Church.
I haven’t seen Thérèse Raquin yet and don’t have any critical guidance to offer but Picker is one of the very best American opera composers and his music is never less than compelling. Get on down to Dicapo this weekend.
Here’s a message from Rama Gottfried:
//
at last! here it is. tomorrow night::
::envelopes for orchestra::
5 minutes of mercury wobbling in space for a 57 piece orchestra
+ and a stacked concert of works by my extremely talented friends at
the manhattan school of music
friday, 2.23.07 – 7:30p
borden auditorium, manhattan school of music
122nd/Broadway (take 1 train to 116(downhill walk) or 125(uphill))
it will be good, you should come.
*** don’t forget to sit in the balcony, it sounds best from there.
the stairs are just as you enter the hall on both sides.
\\
high 5s to all,
rama
I don’t know Ricky Ian Gordon personally but he e-mails me frequently with updates on his projects, never neglecting to sign off with “xxxooo” which I find endearing although I’m sure he does the same for all the guys. I know and like his music mainly from Audra McDonald and a wonderful recording of his songs called Bright-Eyed Joy but nothing I’ve heard or read prepared me for the universal praise for the Minnesota Opera’s production of Gordon’s (with libretto by Michael Korie) The Grapes of Wrath. What we have here, apparently, is a real contender for the title of the Great American Opera.
Listen to the often cranky Mark Swed: “As far as I was concerned — and this is a minority opinion — the nearly four-hour opera was too short. Had Gordon and Korie been allowed to follow their original bliss and create a two-night or more American “Ring” cycle, I would have gladly returned for more.”
Or Variety: “Gordon and Korie have produced a bit of a conundrum: a very long show about suffering and endurance that leaves the viewer enlivened. The intelligence and compassion of their work, combined with the evident vitality and belief of the cast in this opera’s merit, supply high emotion with depth and compassion. This is not a happy story, but its telling is nothing short of incandescent.”
St. Paul Pioneer Press: “Ten years and $2 million in the making, the Minnesota Opera’s world premiere of “The Grapes of Wrath” turns out to be well worth the time and expense: It’s a grand, sprawling, politically astute and musically compelling affair that amply and accessibly answers the rhetorical question: ‘An opera about Okies?'”
Bernard Holland? Well, Bernie’s been sour grapes (not to mention irrelevant) for some time now.
Monday Evening Concerts are alive and well and being given in the great acoustics of Zipper Hall! And if you don’t know why that’s important you’re reading the wrong blog. Last night’s program was the most stimulating in four or five years, stimulating because it presented works by six talented composers, works that were fresh and alive and downright good music.
One of the fresh approaches in the new MEC is to have a musician serve as curator for the program, selecting composers to bring to our attention and determining the works to support the rationale. In this first program Steven Stucky identified six composers in their early-to-middle careers, composers he felt we should know more about. As Stucky pointed out, the awards received and notable appearances given by these six point out they are certainly not “unknown artists”; instead, they are composers we should know much more about. Our local Xtet group provided the professional musicians for five of the six works (student violinists performed the sixth), and composer/conductor/professor Donald Crockett of USC and Xtet conducted four of the pieces.
The concert began with “Gran Turismo” (2005) by Andrew Norman, one of the twenty-year-olds, currently in Rome enjoying his Rome Prize. His bio lists 12 other prizes for composition. The work is a delightful perpetual motion for eight (8) violins. It was inspired by some paintings by Italian Futurists, particularly those of Giacomo Balla showing racing cars, paintings attempting to show movement and speed. A great start for a concert!
James Matheson wrote the next work, “Falling” (2000) for violin, cello and piano. Matheson did his graduate work (MFA, DMA) at Cornell, studying with Stucky and writing his doctoral thesis on Harbison’s music. Also with awards aplenty (I’ll stop saying this), Matheson received a commission from Carnegie for Upshaw’s Perspectives series, a composition for soprano and chamber orchestra. “Falling”, with a recurring motif of descending notes only to end in peaceful contemplation, acknowledges pre-modern musical forms while speaking in contemporary musical language. I could find only one clip of another work by Matheson on the Amazon search, and another clip on iTunes. I’d like to hear both his Carnegie commission and his work for the Albany Orchestra.
Sean Shepard, the other composer in his 20s, closed the first half with “Lumens” (2005) for violin, cello, flute/piccolo, clarinet, piano, and percussion, primarily tuned percussion. His web site gives three clips, which sound exactly as I remembered the performance, plus notes on the composition. I find it interesting that he would mention that some might object to the prettiness of the work, but that he persisted and was able to write something that might be so accessible.
A slightly older contingent had works in the second half of the concert, kicked off by “peal” (2000) by Philippe Bodin. This is a work for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano. Bodin’s note describe the work as variations on a theme of a two-voice canon. My ears don’t hear canon inversions, so I’ll accept his description. His personal web site provides two good clips (and here) of the interesting music.
If applause can be trusted, the audience favorite was the fifth work, “Darkness Visible” (1998-1999) by Ana Lara. Her work (for violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, clarinet, piano, percussion). This is accessible, but moody — quite appealing to an audience hearing it for the first time. Her web site gives eight mp3 clips, all of other works but bearing a compositional relationship to what we heard last night. Amazon has only one composition of hers, on a multi-composer CD. One of her compositions was performed by our local Long Beach, but her works deserve much more exposure.
The program closed similarly to its start, with a work about speed (or time), “Faster Still” (2004) by Brian Current. The master, Alan Rich, quotes Stucky as describing the work: “It’s as if Elliott Carter wrote only arpeggios.” The work is for solo violin and piano, accompanied by a traditional string quartet. The solo violin part is fast and furious (most often), and the piano part is probably somewhat challenging, although it’s not as showy. Tempi change constantly. No sound clips are available. Only one of his works is listed by Amazon. His web site, however, does provide some interesting mp3s, on two web pages.
Steven Stucky made his point: these are composers we should hear more.
Saturday night we saw the L.A. Opera’s production of “Mahagonny“. The reviews haven’t been good. I liked it. Very much. I thought it was the best realization of Brecht’s theories of theatre that I’ve seen, and Audra McDonald was a great Jenny. Conlon as conductor kept all touches of romanticism out of the playing. Of all my musical enthusiasms from college, the one to last has been that for Kurt Weill’s music. I think Brecht is seeming more and more like an historical artifact, but that music is still fresh and bracing.
Jerry Z
One of the many pleasures of the brief (but free) all-Chinary Ung concert given earlier today at Juilliard by the Da Capo Chamber Players was the absence of any blathering about “East meets West.” I’m sure part of the reason for the absence was a simple lack of time for blathering altogether: the performance was given in conjunction with the school’s Composers’ Forum which apparently keeps to a pretty tight schedule. But whatever the reason, such cross-cultural discussion would have been out of place. Ung’s music does not sound eclectic; it does not sound as if it had some agenda of cross-cultural reconciliation. His music sounds like music written by someone from a different musical culture who has found a way to manifest that culture with Western instruments. And the sound of Western instruments in such gifted Eastern hands is disarming, refreshing, and exciting. Ung’s command of extended techniques and his sensitivity to blending instruments must make him (with Tristan Murail) one of the foremost masters of tone color around. Ung’s ability to draw consonant intervals out from dense currents of heterophony, and then to place them back gently into the stream, was amply displayed in “Oracle,” “Luminous Spirals,” “Spiral VI,” and “… Still Life After Death,” the pieces on tonight’s program. While I thought most of the pieces were a little too long, the beautifully tapered endings did not lack impact, and the extra time to savor the sonorities pouring forth from the stage was welcome. A highlight was the concluding vocal duet from “Still Life” between Lucy Shelton and the violinist (David Bowlin). Ung calls upon the violinist to stand and lowly chant an old Buddhist text while the singer whispers and stammers away into another life. This could have been nonsense, but instead it was the most moving music I’ve heard in months.
P.S. The Da Capos are currently recording a CD of Ung’s works. The label? Bridge. (Of course.)
It’s a monster week for our gaucho amigo Lawrence Dillon whose music will be showcased at the Music Now Fest 2007, February 21, 22 and 23 at Eastern Michigan University. This is EMU’s 15th biennial new music festival and it gets underway on Wednesday at 8 pm with a concert of pieces by EMU composers Whitney Prince and Anthony Iannaccone as well as works by Steve Reich, Alberto Ginastera and others. Faculty artists include David Pierce, Willard Zirk, Garik Pedersen, John Dorsey, Kimberly Cole-Luevano, Kristy Meretta, Julie Stone, Kathryn Goodson and guest Cary Kocher.
On Thursday, there will a composer convocation and welcome at 11 AM at Pease Auditorium where Mister Dillon will speak about “Furies and Muses: Composing in the 21st Century.” (My money’s on the Furies.) The lecture will be followed by open student ensemble rehearsals with Dillon and the EMU Symphony Orchestra and University Choir. Open rehearsals with the Wind Symphony and Symphonic Band are scheduled for Friday.
On Thursday night at 8 pm, there will be a faculty recital of the chamber music of Lawrence Dillon, including the aforementioned Furies and Muses, Dunigan Variations, Big Brothers and Facade. Winning composition(s) in the New Chamber Works for Horn competition will be premiered by sponsor Willard Zirk.
On Friday, there is a Meet the composer gig in the afternoon followed by the Festival finale a 8 pm–a concert by EMU’s major performing ensembles who will play Dillon’s Blown Away and Amadeus ex machina. Other works include Ogoun Badagris by Christopher Rouse; Spiel by Ernst Toch, Symphonic Band; and a piece by Anthony Iannaccone.
Presumably, on Saturday, Lawrence will go home and take a nap.
Gordon Wright, a conductor who championed obscure composers and made music across the chilly climes of Alaska as founder of the Arctic Chamber Orchestra, was found dead on Wednesday on the porch of his cabin in Indian, Alaska. He was 72. [more]
In the autumn of her life, decades after she had last performed in public, the British pianist Joyce Hatto was rediscovered by a small group of musicians and critics who contended that her recordings of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Liszt and others ranked alongside those of the 20th century’s most exceptional virtuosos…But now Ms. Hatto’s reputation for excellence and originality has been shaken by a charge of plagiarism. Gramophone, the London music monthly, has presented evidence that several of the recordings issued under her name were in fact copied from recordings of the same music by other pianists. [more]
“The Fly” is about to become an opera. [more]
Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Caroline M. Breece (b.1977 — UK/US)
Michael G. Breece (b. 1971 — US)
Mike over at Avant Music News this week purely by chance beat me to posting about Caroline. I’d planned showing off her and her husband Michael, ever since I bumped into them on Myspace last summer. A number of married composer couples come to mind, but few if any will have the story that’s Caroline’s and Michael’s. A lot of it may only be known to them, but the part we see shows the real possibilities in what might at first seem the improbable.
Caroline, until recently a British native, has the “official” classical education and experience. Playing, studying and composing from a very early age, touring with the Suffolk Youth Orchestra, degrees from the University of East Anglia… all the standard classical upbringing. Yet there’s something in how she relates these and other details (found in her site’s generous writings), and in how her own music works, that is anything but standard.
Michael on the other hand, starts right out of the gate as anything but standard, and there’s every indication that he should have rightfully just kept careening down that highway to oblivion. Hard life in a tough blue-collar non-musical family, serious emotional hurdles, not much if any financial or educational support… Yet part of that mind, against everything that says culture and environment shape us, grew its own seeds of artistic awareness. Schooled by instinct and the resources of the Indianapolis Public Library, he found something incredibly important in the work of composers from Debussy through Varèse and Cage, all the way up to the avant-garde of today. And something told him that he had to not just listen, but *make* this stuff, using whatever means he had.
The meeting of the two? I don’t have a clue. But somehow the English composer with her fresh MMus degree ran into this thundercloud of a self-made musician, and the next thing you know she’s in America. It’s definitely not a fairytale yet; Caroline and Michael both work as janitors to pay the bills, stealing whatever free time they can to create what they have to create. Yet there’s nothing “poor” about either’s music; there’s an incandescence and a real sense of discovery in there. You can hear for yourself when you visit their websites, since they’re both offering entire CDs for free download (though you can do the right thing and send them a few reasonable bucks for a full-spectrum CDR straight from their hands to your ear). And take the time to read through; nothing I write can tell you anything better about them than a few paragraphs in their own words.
Last night’s Never-on-Monday Evening Concert at LACMA presented the Argento Chamber Ensemble in its sampling of German music. Lanier Sammons wrote a nice review of the concert’s performance in New York. As performed here, the program had a different sequence, separating the two pre-Expressionist works so that the Schoenberg Kammersymphonie ended the first half and the Wagner transcription ended the second. Despite Lanier’s good review (and that from the NY Times), I felt the concert made a strong argument that an ensemble of five strings and ten winds does not make for good balance and clean textures. Listening to the Liebestod made me think of a transcription for concert band, one with a few strings thrown in. I did enjoy the Rihm and Haas performances, both of which were West Coast premieres, and I thought that the performance of the Kleine Harlekin of Stockhausen was a delight, and a very good concert-opener. Fortunately, the new management of the music programs at LACMA did away with the slide-show of art during the concert. I hope the management also learns that it’s better to plan and organize what you’re going to say when you come to talk to the audience while the stage is being set up.
On Sunday, Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov won two 2007 Grammy awards—Best Opera Recording and Best Contemporary Classical Composition—for his opera, Ainadamar (Fountain Of Tears) starring soprano Dawn Upshaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with conductor Robert Spano. In August of last year, WGBH Classics in the Morning host Cathy Fuller sat down with Golijov at his home in Brookline, MA and discussed this award winning opera, his first. This exclusive, in-depth interview—complete with excerpts from the moving opera—can be heard online at wgbh.org/osvaldo.
Ainadamer tells the story of dramatist Federico García Lorca and his muse, Catalan stage actress Margarita Xirgu (in a twist, Lorca is played by a woman) and incorporates Arab, Jewish, and flamenco elements.
Classics in the Morning with Cathy Fuller airs weekdays, 9am-12noon on 89.7 FM in New England and streams live worldwide at wgbh.org/classical.